The technical failure that led to hundreds of flight cancellations and severe disruptions for thousands of people traveling in and out of Britain last week resulted from a “one in 15 million chance,” the country’s air traffic control service said on Wednesday. “We have processed 15 million flight plans with this system,” Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Britain’s National Air Traffic Service, told the BBC’s “Today” program. And the service, he said, had “never seen this before.”On Wednesday, the service published a report based on an internal investigation of the event, detailing what Mr. Rolfe described as “an incredibly rare set of circumstances.”According to the report, the air traffic control system encountered two separate pieces of navigational data in one aircraft’s flight plan that had the same name. As a result, the system’s primary and backup computer systems both shut down to avoid passing incorrect information to the controllers.

---

Persons: “, ” Martin Rolfe, Rolfe Organizations: Britain’s National Air Traffic Service, ” Locations: Britain